Image registration is used in many application domains such as medical applications, computer aided manufacturing, robotics and others. For example, two or more images of the same scene may have been captured at different times and/or from different view points and/or using different image capture equipment. It may be required to put those images into registration in order to detect differences between the images which are not the result of pose variations of objects in the scene and/or of different view points of an image capture device used to capture the images.
Image registration in the field of medical applications is particularly useful. For example, in clinical scenarios such as patient follow-up and surgery or therapy planning. To enable a medical professional to compare medical images in an accurate manner the images need to be registered in order to remove pose variations of the patient. For example, the registration may result in alignment of corresponding anatomical structures in two medical images.
There is an ongoing need to improve the accuracy and robustness of image registration systems as well as to reduce the time taken for image registration and the computational resources required.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known image registration systems.